I happened to catch an interview on Radio New Zealand the other week which really pricked up my antennae. It was an interview with Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, talking about her new book Better than Before. The Happiness Project has sold over 1.5 million copies and struck a chord with people all over the globe. It follows Gretchen’s pursuit to discover what truly makes her happy, and contains a lot of scientific research and wisdom on how to increase your own happiness. She followed that up with the engaging Happier at Home, which charts Gretchen’s experiments to improve several aspects of her life related to her home, including her possessions, her marriage, her children and wider family, her engagement with her community.

In this interview with Kathryn Ryan (if you are really interested I would listen to it now as I don’t know how long Radio NZ keeps their podcasts online for), Gretchen talks about how creating new habits truly can transform our lives. Gretchen argues that if there is something about yourself that you don’t like and want to change, one of the most effective ways to create a lasting change is to form a new habit. A change needs to become that ingrained if it is going to stick long-term.

Gretchen states that our habits are the building blocks of our lives, and are so ingrained that we rarely think about them. Most of us don’t think ‘Shall I brush my teeth today?’ We just do it as part of our daily routine. Therefore she argues that our habits can be the most effective scaffolding for creating a you that is better than the old you.

She goes on to say that in order to successfully create a new habit (like giving up sugar), you must understand how your personality affects the way in which you form habits, because habit formation is not a one-size-fits-all thing. In her research she discovered that most of us fall into one of four groups: Upholders, Questioners, Obligers and Rebels. You can take a quiz here to find out what you are. For example, a questioner has to be convinced that changing something about themselves by forming a certain habit really is the best thing for them. I am an obliger, meaning I often overlook my needs for that of others, so forming a new habit which benefits myself is tricky. If we don’t get our strategies right, new habits just won’t stick.

What I love about Gretchen’s work is that she is PRACTICAL. I have read much about habit formation in my time, and none of it makes as much sense to me as her work does. There are a lot of myths out there (like it only takes 21 days to form a new habit), and Gretchen has sifted through it all. She has some great-yet-simple strategies for the different personality types e.g. say if you are an obliger like me and you want to exercise more – exercise with a friend who will be miffed if you don’t show up, because it is the accountability to someone else that is the key ingredient here. If you want to know more, buy the book!

She also talked about ‘abstainers’ versus ‘moderators’. Moderators are the sort of people who can have a block of chocolate in their desk and eat a square or two a day. Abstainers are people like me, who would scoff the lot straight away, so they find it EASIER to just abstain from chocolate altogether. What this means is that if you are struggling to give up sugar (or carbs, or alcohol, or whatever) it might be because you are an abstainer. Having sugar in the house, or indulging in it here and there is not the best strategy for you.

Obviously what she said resonated with me. Completely abstaining from sugar has worked for me far better than only having a bit here and there. Saying no to offers of treats from well-meaning friends and family is much easier for me than eating it and dealing with the horrible consequences (feeling tired, spike in appetite, craving more sugar etc.).

Anyway, after listening to the podcast D and I talked about some things about ourselves that we’d like to change, and how we might do it, armed with this new knowledge. D is an obliger too (although with very strong questioner tendencies) and wants to cut down his use of his smartphone. He has enlisted me to call him out whenever I see him using it either too much, or at an inappropriate time, i.e. while the kids want to play with him. In turn, as my accountability person, I have enlisted D’s help to ensure I get out of bed early each morning to exercise. As I am an abstainer I have also decided to exercise every day, so that longer lie-ins are just not an option. Hopefully exercise first thing in the morning will be just something that I do, just like brushing my teeth.

Having recently read Happier at Home, I have been inspired to launch a similar project. I will be posting more detail on this soon over at my ‘brain-dump’ blog Tots in Tawhero. And I will certainly keep you posted about whether my sleep-in abstinence strategy works.

If you have some bad habits that you’d like to replace for healthier ones, I highly recommend having a read of Gretchen’s website and books.

Like this:

It’s been a good three days and I am already down 600g. But then, that’s probably because I’ve been really hungry!

Aside from Monday’s icky bruschetta, the food on the 12WBT has been nice and of course, sugar-free. Monday night’s dinner was really lovely – a lamb salad with mint/yoghurt dressing. It’s definitely a recipe I’d use again.

Yummo!

On the programme you have to weigh all your food which is a total pain, but it’s helped me to realise that my portion sizes have been too big. I simply eat too much. I expect that this is a legacy of years of overeating, even though I am now sugar-free (although I certainly eat less than I did in my sugary days thanks to being sugar-free). I’m going to have to train my body to get used to a bit less food. I’m even on the look out for vintage dinner plates! Did you know the average dinner plate has grown 25% larger since the 1990’s? Here’s a link to an article about how even the colour of your plates and tablecloth can cause you to overeat.

I’ve really missed my protein and needed to eat snacks as a result, so I swapped out the carby/fructosey breakfasts for my usual bacon & egg this morning (yes, that’s allowed on the food plan) and voila! No morning tea required.

My one criticism of the food is that many of the lunches are time-consuming, but I guess as least they can be swapped out for quick sandwiches like this one…

Roast capsicum and olive tapenade sarnie

I have absolutely no complaints about my fitness programme however. Last week I did a baseline fitness test which includes the distance you can run in 12 minutes. I did the 12 minute test again today (every Wednesday is a ‘check-in’ day) and I’ve already increased my distance. The programme has 3 days of running – which includes sprints, and 3 days of core strengthening and toning. I’m doing the intermediate programme and I’ve been delighted to find it challenging but not daunting so far.

I’ve started to run around the Basin Reserve (our local cricket ground) which has turned out to be the perfect place for me to run, after struggling to find somewhere nearby that doesn’t have ginormous hills. It also means I get to end my workouts by going up these steps:

There are 108 steps. Yep, I counted.

You can’t really tell how steep they are in the photo, but nothing gets my heart rate up faster than these babies!

I must admit that I’m not actually a fan of ‘quick’ transformation diets and programmes. Most of them are completely unsustainable, so please don’t think I have any illusions about this one. I’ve never even seen Michelle Bridges in action. You can read about my reasons for signing up to it here. But I must say…I like 12WBT.

I was impressed with the ‘pre-season’ tasks you had to do before the round kicked off this Monday. The goal-setting task made me dig quite deep, and those goals will be revisited every four weeks on the programme. There are a series of mini-milestones you can set yourself too (one of mine is to buy a new dress…sorry D).

One of the tasks was to tell people you are doing the programme, to put it out there, to make yourself accountable. Of all the tasks, this one was the hardest for me – even more so than taking a ‘before’ picture of myself. I felt embarrassed. But I did it, and was immediately inundated with likes and lovely messages of support.

I also like that every few days there is something 12WBT-related going on to keep you in the game. On Sunday night there’s a video message to get your head set for the week, weekly challenges on Mondays, a stats day on Wednesdays, meal and fitness plans for the following week on Thursdays, plus a few other things as well. If you choose to engage with it, there’s probably enough in the programme to keep you on track. I feel it’s doable, but then it’s not a huge lifestyle change for me, given that D and I try to eat healthily and I was exercising regularly anyway. But I reckon even die-hard couch potatoes could do the programme and see results. Whether you can keep it up in ‘real life’ is another story.

I reckon if I can take a good exercise programme and the portion control message out of it, that’s good enough for me.

Like this:

While I was stuck in Blahland last week I thought long and hard about what to do with myself to get out of the blahs. I figured I needed a bit of help to re-focus and get my head back in the right space. But as I am moving towns in a few weeks and we’ll soon be entering the Christmas season (gasp! Already?), life is just a bit too up in the air for me to commit to any kind of fitness class or to see a nutritionist about why my baby weight just won’t budge.

A few bloggers I follow have done Michelle Bridges 12 week body transformation programmes and have had some great results. My Aussie readers will probably be quite familiar with her. I’ve never seen it but she’s a trainer on the Australian version of The Biggest Loser. I only know her through her fitness articles that appear on a New Zealand media site and she’s always come across as a ‘straight up’, practical sort of person to me.

I vacillated about whether to sign up or not – mostly because there’s lots of people out there who talk about signing up to do ‘another round because they’ve put on a few kilos since they did the last round’ – which says to me that the programme just isn’t sustainable.

But then I thought ‘well, what do I really need right now?‘ My motivation levels aren’t that bad. I’m still running. I do it by myself without any help except for the odd time D threatens to tickle me out of bed when I’m tempted to hit the snooze button (I am extremely ticklish…). I’m still eating sugar-free, and that just feels like normal life now.

I decided I needed:

to up my current level of fitness

tweak my diet to see if I can shed that weight

to connect with others for encouragement and accountability

to make it through moving/the silly season

My best friend R has been seeing a great nutritionist in her home town (close to where we are moving to), and I have been very impressed with the advice and holistic approach he has given to R. It’s sensible. Sustainable. Achievable. (Plus R looks fabulous and is feeling vibrant and healthy.) D and I plan to see him ourselves in the new year, when all the moving dust has settled. But the new year is still several weeks away and I need something now…

The round starts on 11 November. I’m doing the 10k running programme which is not the slightest bit startling as I was doing a 5 to 10k running programme anyway. But I’ve already connected with an incredibly nice bunch of people and am looking forward to the round getting underway soon.

I’m not 100% sure as I haven’t got the meal plans yet, but I think Michelle Bridges does advocate using some low-fat food. If that’s the case, there’s no way I will be following the plans to the letter as I am a diehard ‘wholefooder’. I’ll just substitute low fat for full fat, thank you very much. Anyway, it’s the fitness training aspect that I am most interested in.

One of the things I like about Michelle is that she’s a firm believer that your mindset is crucial to making long-lasting changes. To her, hearing people say ‘I’m too busy to exercise’ is like someone saying ‘I’m too busy to brush my teeth’. She reckons exercising should be no big deal – just part of your daily routine.

Part of the programme gives the participants tasks to help change their thoughts about themselves, about food and nutrition, and about exercise. The first task was great. You really had to take a hard look at yourself and dig deep. One of things I had to do was list all the excuses I use not to exercise, like ‘I’m too tired’, ‘People might make fun of me’, ‘I’m too busy’ or ‘It’s raining’. Boy, I use that first excuse a lot! Michelle is all about setting yourself up for success to overcome all your excuses.

Somethings I do already so I have fewer excuses that stop me from running are to lay my clothes out the night before, and to run first thing in the morning. I’ve tried exercising at other times of the day, but something almost always came up. A meeting would run over time, or I’d simply feel too tired. At least in the morning I get up, run, and it’s over and done with. But looking at my number one complaint of being ‘too tired’ made me realise that I really, really need to make sure I go to bed earlier than I have been.

I am someone who needs at least eight hours of sleep. At least. In fact, more is better. Some people can function on five or six hours a night and seem to cope okay. I am not one of them. Tiredness very quickly reduces me to a teary, irritable, bitchy mess. And many days when my alarm has gone off I haven’t had enough sleep because D and I have gone to bed just too darned late.

My solution to my I’m-too-tired-to-go-running excuse is to get my IT guru husband D to put something on my computer that shuts it off at 9pm so I am in bed by 9:30pm and not catching up on Facebook or reading terribly important lifehacks on Buzzfeed. Yes. My bedtime will officially make me a Nana. But I will be a fit Nana 🙂

I wondered if I had inadvertently eaten sugar as I was tired, irritable, hungry and completely lacking in motivation. But I can’t think what it could have been hiding in. All I know is I ate too many carbs, and we had takeaways twice. Just not a great week foodwise, despite it being sugar-free.

I was too tired to run and hit snooze a couple of mornings in a row, and was also thwarted in my running plans by the weather (and my word we are being hit by a heck of a storm right now too). By the time the weekend arrived I had run a grand total of 0 times. I felt pretty darn disappointed in myself.

I was in the blahs.

I chastised myself for being lazy, for not looking after myself properly. Which quickly spiralled into angry thoughts about why I was not losing weight like a bandit eating and exercising the way I’ve been. I had visions of myself coming last in next month’s charity run.

A bright point was R visiting for a while on her way back from Australia. My daughter just loves her and it’s always fun to see them having a ‘chat’. And then the sunshine returned (briefly) for the weekend, and after a picnic and stroll with D and Eloise I felt more like myself. On Saturday night I psyched myself up to go running. I thought about all the reasons I should go for a run. I laid my clothes out at the ready. When my alarm went off I got my butt out of bed and went for that run.

Initially I was like ‘Oh, this is gonna be hard’. After a few minutes I thought ‘Yep. Suspicions confirmed. This is hard’. My legs were saying ‘Ummm, hello? You want us to cooperate after a week of not stretching us? We have news for you, Angela’. But I kept this face in the forefront of my thoughts:

My motivation

Yes, I am the one doing the hard yards, pounding the pavement and leaping over sugary cakes with a single bound in my quest to live healthily. But my daughter is the reason I’m here talking to you right now. That chubby-cheeked smiling girl is all the motivation I need. I want to pass on good eating habits to her, so I eat sugar-free. I don’t want her to have weight problems like I have, so I’m raising her sugar-free (ask me how that’s working when she’s on the birthday party circuit). I run so I will be fit enough to keep up with her when she’s a toddler. I run because I enjoy it and I want Eloise to see that exercise is part of life.

So as I was running and thinking ‘Eloise, this is for you, my sweet little monkey’, the run became easy and I settled into a good pace. I should be going out there tomorrow but this awful weather is set to continue so I’ll have to work out to a video or something. My point is, I’m back in the running game.

I was reflecting with D how my attitude to running is becoming aligned with how I think about living without sugar. The old Angela would probably have used not running for a week as an excuse to quit altogether. On the rare occasions I’ve eaten some sugar, I no longer throw in the towel. I get back on track at the next meal. So a week of not running – while discouraging and full of negative thoughts – truly did not feel like the end of the world to me.

Ladies and gentlemen, sometimes we just have a case of the blahs. Our motivation seems to have packed its bags.

And that’s okay.

Life is like that. Sometimes we are all fired up and feel like everything is rosy. We’re on top of this healthy living thing! Pass me my kale & quinoa smoothie.

Other times it feels like an effort, and you wonder what the point of it all is. Everyone else is eating their muffins and quaffing their milkshakes. Waaah!

Push through the blahs. The blahs are like that bully who made your life miserable back in school. Full of s**t, and eager to take you down a peg or two, you uppity, healthy livin’ freak. Well, you made it out of high school. And you’ll make it through a few days or weeks of living in blahland. It’s all going to be okay, just don’t quit.

Stand up to those blahs. Like any bully they will cave at the first sign of resistance. Arm yourself with ninja skills to strike back. Ask yourself:

Why am I doing this?

What benefits do I hope to see? Get your vision quest on.

What goals am I working towards?

What benefits have I already seen?

Who’s with me in this? Form a posse of like-minded people, even if they’re just online friends.

Like this:

After doing Live Below The Line last week and my whirlwind trip to Australia to see a friend get married, if feels great to be home, and to be back to my usual diet.

I had a brilliant time staying in the Yarra Valley, just outside of Melbourne. Expense meant that D and Eloise couldn’t come with me, and it was quite hard to leave Eloise behind. They decamped to my mother-in-law’s house and had a whale of a time. Three Kiwi friends also attended the wedding with me, and it was great to hang out with them. I also caught up with a friend I hadn’t seen for six years, which was wonderful. It was like we’d just seen each other last week – I reckon that’s the true test of friendship.

I love travelling and relished the opportunity to go sight-seeing around Melbourne sans infant who needs naps. I hadn’t been to Melbourne for 20 years and enjoyed exploring the inner city. My friend K and I are crime buffs (we did criminology at Uni together) so we headed off to the Old Melbourne Gaol. A sad, sobering place, but an important part of Melbourne’s history. It wasn’t all doom and gloom either. As part of the tour, you can be part of a scripted re-enactment of Ned Kelly’s trial, and yours truly got to be the judge. (Oh the power of the gavel!)

K and I stayed at the wedding venue which was set amongst some amazing grounds. I went for a run by some wetlands the morning of the wedding and saw a Kangaroo in the wild! It was very exciting for me, but my Aussie friends could barely contain their yawns 🙂 It was all Kangaroo, schmangaroo to them.

If you squint, you can see the Kangaroo…

My friend’s wedding was lovely – very relaxed, and full of their humour and personalities. Yes, I did eat a piece of wedding cake (I found it incredibly sickly), and got back on the sugar-free wagon the next day. I’m not sure how much it added to today’s tiredness as I’ve had to readjust to NZ time + the start of daylight savings, but I was so exhausted this morning that after being up for an hour I needed to go back to bed for a nap! Thank goodness D can work from home in times like these (you’re a gem, D).

Anyway, it’s back to reality for me. Tomorrow I will start a 5 to 10k running programme, so I’m hoping for more energy than today!

Next week D and I are taking part in the Live Below The Line challenge. Basically the ethos of the challenge is this: 1.2 billion people around the world are living in extreme poverty, and Live Below the Line believes we all have a responsibility to change this.

Live Below The Line believe that understanding poverty is so vital, that they challenge us fortunate people who live above the poverty line to see what it’s like to live below the poverty line for a few days. Understanding how difficult life is for those living in poverty may galvanize people into action and transform lives. Each person or group doing the challenge raises money for a nominated charity.

From the 23rd – 27th of September we can spend no more than $2.25 a day on food and drink.

This means D and I have a total of $22.50 with which to buy all our ingredients for every meal that week.

The full cost of all the items we eat must be included in our budget. This means budgeting for whole packets of food items such as rice, pasta, noodles and eggs etc.

For items such as salt, pepper, herbs and spices, we must work out the cost of each item per gram and budget our shopping proportionally.

We can share the cost of ingredients amongst a team, as long as no participant spends more than $2.25 a day or their total $11.25 budget. Working as a team allows you to pool together funds and do more with your cooking.

We can’t grab a cheeky snack from the cupboard unless we include the cost of buying the item new in our budget.

We can use food sourced from our garden as long as we can account for the price of production.

We can’t accept ‘donated’ food from family or friends, but monetary donations towards our fundraising goals are acceptable, and encouraged!

We are allowed to drink tap water.

Heck! Now there’s a challenge.

D and I are donating any money we raise (plus our usual grocery budget) to Partners Relief and Development who have been bringing freedom and fullness to the children in Burma through relief, development, healthcare and education. (I will be participating in their Run for Relief in November too.) If you’d like to donate to us, you can do so here, it’s such a great cause.

D and I are meal-planning ninjas from way back (seriously, if you’ve never done it, you will save soooo much money and waste soooo much less), but this challenge will be my toughest meal plan yet. We’re pooling resources with our Minister from Church and his wife to help stretch our budget a bit further. Our Minister’s wife is a dietician, so I’m glad to be nutting out a plan with her!

I’m sure we can get creative, but just thinking about how little our money will get us, and the effort it will take to plan our meals has already given me even more compassion for those living in poverty. It’s hard to eat well on that kind of money, and I imagine meals get very monotonous.

I can’t even begin to think about those unable to feed their kids without welling up with tears. I must admit to times where being overweight utterly shames me when there are so many people out there who are dying of starvation right this second.

My low carb, high fat diet will go out the window for the week, as I imagine I will need carbs to feel full as I won’t be able to afford to eat protein, unless we can get some eggs dirt cheap (or do I mean cheep?). One good thing is there’s definitely no room for sugary rubbish in that kind of budget, so perhaps a whole bunch of people doing the challenge may experience some withdrawal symptoms?

The day after the challenge I will be hopping on a plane to Australia to attend a wedding where my meal is costing the equivalent of our weekly food budget! What a crazy world…

My brother’s party was on Saturday night and it was a blast. I got to catch up with family members I hadn’t seen in ages, and even got to meet a long-lost cousin who turned out to be a kindred spirit. Love it when that happens. I wrote a cheeky birthday song for my brother (to the tune of ‘These are a few of my favourite things’) and my ‘choir’ did a fabulous job performing it at the party. I may have found a new career penning silly ditties.

D and I spent several hours decorating the chocolate mudcake I made for J’s party. See here for the story of why I made a sugary cake, and here for my attitude towards the occasional special event. The smell of the fondant icing was extremely sickly and I wondered if I would have noticed it before going sugar-free. The cake decoration turned out much better than I’d hoped, although I certainly have no plans to make any sugary cakes ever again. Any cakes will be strictly dextrose-only.

My brother LOVED his cake and just sat looking at it for several minutes as he didn’t want to cut it! I had a small piece and found it incredibly sweet, and thought the fondant icing was disgusting. But the birthday boy and everyone else thought it was delicious, so job done.

The contentious cake!(Apologies for the poor quality of the photo, our camera has gone missing so this is someone else’s pic. That lumpy looking thing in the corner is actually a detailed half death star.)

It took me aaaaaages to get to sleep that night. Part of that is because I’m an extrovert, so I find it really hard to unwind after a party. Being around large groups of people is very stimulating. However, I’m not usually left lying awake for well over two hours, so I’m attributing part of it to the sugar.

I was definitely hungrier than usual yesterday, and had cravings for soft serve – you know, the stuff so bad it’s not allowed to be called ice cream. Of course, I didn’t actually have any. This morning’s run was so pathetic I abandoned it 10 minutes in, and will try again tomorrow instead.

Am I worried that my recent sugary ‘lapses’ will plunge me back into my sugar-laden days?

Nope.

I girded my loins and went straight back to eating sugar-free.

And that’s the best part of living this way. I have control over food. I no longer stuff myself with sweets or biscuits (cookies) because the cravings for them overwhelm me. I no longer feel ashamed for giving in to my cravings again and again and again. In the old days, I would have used eating some birthday cake as an excuse to quit my current diet. But not anymore. Oh, the freedom! It’s not an exaggeration to say that for me, this is nothing short of a miracle.

Eating some birthday cake was a conscious choice, and I knew what the consequences would be. And while we’re at it, I really hate the term ‘lapse’. I prefer to think of them as part of normal life, now reserved only for super-special occasions (given the frequency of special events in my social calendar!).

Like this:

Due to being sick for two boring weeks a while back, I realised I needed to revise my running goals.

I’m now on week 7 of Couch to 5K (wahoo!) and should now be running 5ks by mid-September.

Sadly the fun run/walk for A Girl Called Hope won’t be happening in Wellington as they can’t find anyone to organise it. If I wasn’t so busy myself, I would offer to do it. (If you live in Wellington, and have good organisational skills, give them a call.) This is a real shame as they are an amazing charity who deserve the publicity and financial support the run/walk brings them.

So I’ve had to find another charity event to train for (there’s a bit of a dearth of them until November), and I have decided to run in the Run for Relief 7k challenge. Run for Relief helps support Burmese citizens who are hiding/living in fear from the Burmese government. Every $50 raised helps provide enough food and emergency supplies for a month for people hiding out in the Burmese jungles. I’ve had a lot to do with refugees in both my working and voluntary life, so I’m looking forward to running for this cause.

Run for Relief hold events all over the world, so if you’re a runner, and this cause meets with your values then do sign up. The Wellington run isn’t until November which gives me plenty of time to train for 7ks.

I’ve been running every other day, except for the odd occasion that it’s raining. Part of me still can’t believe I have the motivation to do so! Let alone ENJOY it. My legs feel stronger and more toned. My recovery is taking less and less time, and I’ve noticed that it’s getting easier to climb the hills that surround where we live. I sure as heck get all hot and sweaty during my runs, but the ever-increasing distances feel manageable.

I’ve stopped weighing myself – I was getting a bit obsessed, and frustrated by the scales not going down. I don’t know if I’ve lost any more weight, but my clothes think I have. They are certainly getting loose.

I’m looking forward to more good weather so I can get back to running in my local park. The park is surrounded by native bush on two sides, and the birds start up their dawn chorus at the time that I run although they have to compete with my playlist (I’m currently addicted to the Pitch Perfect soundtrack).